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Ben Bernanke is about to play the biggest poker hand in global monetary policy history: The Federal Reserve chairman is trying to force China to fold on its fixed dollar-yuan currency peg. This is high-stakes poker.

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The Federal Reserve’s second round of quantitative easing to the tune of $600bn put a firework under a trend that started back in August when Fed Governor Ben Bernanke first touted the idea of providing more monetary policy support to the US economy. Risky assets are in demand and the market is happy to sell dollars.

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The communiqué from last week’s IMF G20 finance minister’s meeting was the first step in trying to resolve the so-called global currency war. The ministers released a joint statement on October 23 which pledged that all countries would “move towards more market determined exchange rate systems that reflect underlying economic fundamentals and refrain from competitive devaluation of currencies.”

from MacroScope:

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Economist Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth College has stirred up a bit of a fuss by concluding in some academic research that it was France, not the United States, that was most to blame for The Great Depression.

from The Great Debate:

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A warning by an International Energy Agency (IEA) analyst this week that quantitative easing (QE) risked inflating nominal commodity prices and derailing the recovery drew a withering response from Nobel Economics Laureate Paul Krugman, who labelled the unfortunate analyst the "worst economist in the world".

from The Great Debate:

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In 1987, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher whipped up a firestorm of criticism from her opponents on the left when she told a magazine reporter that "there is no such thing as society", only individual men and women, and families.